Welcome to PROVENCE TODAY, a blog about life and politics in France.
In our search for the ideal place to retire, my husband and I settled in Aix-en-Provence in 1998 and have never stopped learning about this fascinating country that has become our permanent home. While this blog deals with the socio-political aspects of France, my book "Taking Root in Provence" focuses on the pleasures and paradoxes of daily life in sunny Provence.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

PORK FARMING IN TROUBLE; PORK AT SCHOOL; AMERICAN HEROES

PROBLEMS AT THE PORK FARM

Pork farmers blocking roads

The summer of 2015 has been a hot one, with temperatures
rarely dipping below 30-C and often reaching 37 or 38-C, which is uncommonly
high in Provence. The usually quiet month of August (government on holiday) was
further heated up by a crisis in the pork industry that has resulted in
truckloads of manure being dumped in front of government buildings, access to
certain supermarkets and tourist sites (Mont St. Michel) being blocked, and
major roads from Germany and Spain being barricaded to stop agricultural
products from coming in. The cause of this upheaval is the price of pork, set
twice a week by the Breton Pork Market in Plérin, which pig farmers claim is
too low to cover their production costs.

Some external reasons for this are the EU economic sanctions
on Russia over Ukraine, effectively closing down a huge export market of EU
meat, as well as slowing Chinese demand. The resulting excess of pork products
has flooded European markets at depressed prices. But other reasons are to be
found in France and its family farms that are too small to compete with the
larger, heavily mechanized farms in Germany and Spain. Says one farmer:
"We pay higher social charges than our European competitors and are
burdened by an accumulation of environmental and other regulations in France,
including a government-set maximum size of our farms. How can we compete?"

The support system of price controls, EU subsidies and state
aid that has underpinned French agriculture for decades is now unraveling, and
it is generally agreed that France needs to reform its agriculture in depth.
This includes the entire breeding sector, from pork to beef to milk producers,
whose size and traditional methods make them uncompetitive.

France accounts for more than ten percent of EU pork
production, most of it in Brittany. In the past, the industrial meat purchasers
have occasionally bought up overproduction at set prices to absorb the excess,
but this time two of the biggest French pork buyers were unwilling to participate,
boycotting the Plérin exchange and shutting it down for eight days. They
refused to pay the farmers' price of €1.40 per kilo below which, the farmers
say, they cannot make ends meet. Today, one quarter of all French pig farmers
are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Farmers dump live pigs at supermarket

All eyes are now on Stéphane le Foll, French Minister of
Agriculture, who has called a roundtable of all players and offered the farmers
an emergency package of €600 million in tax relief and government-backed loans
but failed to address the foreign competition issue. Like most French farmers
who blame Europe for overproducing and selling at cheap prices which they
cannot match, Le Foll agrees that the solution lies in harmonizing prices among
European states. "If we could find a price compatible with the German,
Spanish and British systems, we could talk" he said at a news conference
last week. He will meet his counterparts from other European farming nations in
Brussels on September 7th, where he will try to obtain guarantees. However, according
to Catherine Laillé who runs a pig farm in the Loire Atlantique region, the
government should act on the French social welfare charges and regulations
which need to be brought in line with those of other EU farming nations.
Failing that, she says, the French breeding sector is bound to die out.

French public opinion is squarely on the side of the
farmers. The French love their farm-raised products, which they buy at daily
outdoor markets, convinced that fresh small-farm produce is superior to
supermarket produce. They are willing to pay more for organic food, a growing
sector, and would probably be willing to pay more for French pork to save the
breeders, but supermarkets and distributors object to a rather significant
price difference between French and less expensive imported pork. For the
consumer, saving the French family farm is an emotional issue, for the free
market an economic one. We all know, of course, which side will win.

PORK AT SCHOOL?

Speaking of pork, the question of whether or not pork should
be offered at public school cafeterias has made front-page news this month. For
years, public schools have been offering a standard lunch menu as well as one
without pork for those with religious objections. But in March of this year,
Mayor Gilles Patret of Chablon-sur-Saône announced that he was against
religion-based substitute menus in public schools and would ban them in his
community come September. Pork has been served once a week as part of the
standard school menu, and on those days a substitute menu was available to
Muslim or Jewish students. Patret's decision was denounced by his Muslim
constituents and by some Muslim leaders, and ended up being challenged in
court. But on August 13th a judge in Dijon ruled in favor of Mayor Patret,
accepting his argument that vegetarian menus are available every day and that
nobody is obliged to eat pork. Citing the cost of substitute menus and the
principle of laicité in public
schools, Patret suggested that Muslim parents (he does not have Jewish
constituents) pack a sandwich on pork days, but that no secular school should
be expected to observe religious restrictions of one kind or another.

The 1905 French law on separation of church and state has at times been used to
political advantage, and some ten years ago served to ban the wearing of Muslim
headscarves, Jewish skull caps, crosses or other "ostentatious"
displays of religion inside French public schools. France has both the largest Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe, and tensions in the Middle East are often replayed between the two communities. Not surprisingly, the
incident in Chalon-sur-Saône was seized on by the extreme-right Islamophobic Front National Party of Marine Le Pen
who declared she would immediately ban the pork-less substitute meals in the
eleven communities her Party controls.

Public opinion is largely divided along political lines, with
conservatives supporting the court's decision, but Abdallah Zekri, speaking for
the Council for the Muslim Faith, called the decision regrettable and "not
taken to bring social peace to schools". No comment from the French pork
farmers who must be quietly jubilating.

PARIS PLAGES - GAZA
PLAGE

Paris Plage 2015

Every summer the City of Paris offers local vacationers a
very popular month-long event, Paris
Plages: more than three kilometers of sandy beaches on the banks of the
Seine with deck chairs, parasols, palm trees and food stands, and some water-sports events
at the La Villette Basin. This year, however, the holiday atmosphere was
clouded by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo's decision to celebrate the city of
Tel-Aviv on August 13th with one-day festivities of Jewish music and foods as
part of Paris Plages. The
announcement was met with outrage from pro-Palestinian quarters who responded
with their own Gaza Plage on the
other side of the Notre Dame bridge, facing Tel-Aviv
sur Seine.

Trying to calm the waters, Hidalgo explained: "The idea
was born on a diplomatic mission of the Paris City Council to Israel and
Palestine last May to feature Tel-Aviv this year just as we have in the past
invited Athens and various beach-front cities of Brazil and Polynesia".
She called Tel-Aviv a progressive city that is known for its opposition to the
hardliners in their government and said that France entertains a lively
exchange of culture and new technologies with the city.

Nevertheless, the pro-Palestinians found it unacceptable to
honor a country responsible for the killing of four children on a Gaza beach
last summer and more recently the fire-bombing of a house in Gaza that killed a
young father and his baby boy. "Would you have organized a Berlin Beach in 1944?" one
protester cried. Answering the call of the Europalestine Association, some one
hundred protesters gathered to wave a Palestinian flag, hand out free falafels
and carry "Boycott Israel" signs.

Tel-Aviv sur Seine

On the opposite bank a festive mood reigned as people danced
with an Israeli flag and chanted to Jewish music, offering typical pastries and
generally ignoring the disturbance as much as they could. Some, however, spoke
of a sense of apartheid and expressed
their disappointment at the reconstitution of the Israeli-Palestine conflict in
this relaxed and happy beach setting in Paris.

Despite the tension in the air, the day ended without major
incident, in large part due to preventive security measures (metal detectors
and a bag check at the entrance to Tel-Aviv
sur Seine) and a police force of 500 who managed to keep the two opposing
camps separated and nipped flare-ups in the bud.

Free-market pricing, pork on public school menus, even Paris
Plages − in the end All is Politics, as Thomas Mann would
say.

The talk of the day in France is about the courageous
Americans who forestalled a terrorist attack on a passenger train from
Amsterdam to Paris last Friday. It so happened that in the last car of the
Thalys high-speed train three Americans (two off-duty military personnel and
one university student who were childhood friends) were traveling together when
they noticed a young man with a heavy bag on his way to the toilet. Next,
their trained ears picked up the sound of a magazine being loaded into a
machine gun and almost simultaneously a shot being fired at a French passenger
who tried to stop the gunman as he came out of the toilet with a Kalashnikov
rifle. "Let's get him" one of the Americans yelled as they ran up to
jump the gunman, led by Spencer Stone (6 ft. 4") who got there first and tried to wrestle
the gun away. In the struggle a shot went off, slightly wounding a passenger,
and Stone was slashed in the neck and hand with a box cutter knife. The three
managed to overpower the gunman ("we beat him unconscious") and,
helped by a British passenger who came to their aid, tied him up and grabbed
the weapons: a machine gun with nine magazines, a handgun and a box cutter.

Spencer Stone leaving hospital

As the train rolled into the station of Arras where police
took the attacker into custody, the train carriage (the last one on the train,
a perfect trap) revealed a movie-like scene of dazed passengers and several
bloodied victims: the wounded Frenchman, Spencer Stone with knife wounds to his
neck and hand, one passenger with a superficial head wound from a glancing
bullet, and another one with cuts to his hand sustained when he broke the window
to pull the emergency brake. The Frenchman who was shot is recovering in a
Lille hospital and is out of danger, Stone underwent an operation on his nearly
severed thumb and was released two days later, and all others were treated for
minor injuries.

Bernard Cazeneuve, Minister of the Interior, who had rushed
to the scene, later announced on television that an initial investigation has
revealed that the suspect is 26-year-old Moroccan citizen Ayoud El-Khazzani who
had lived in Spain and in France, and had been placed on a police watch list in
2014 for his radical Islamist views and suspected links to ISIS. He had boarded
the train in Brussels, intent on committing a massacre. Cazeneuve expressed his
gratitude to the Americans for their courageous act that without a doubt had foiled
a terrorist attack. They were also praised by President Obama and will be
received by President Hollande at the Elysée Palace on Monday.

To each of the fearless Americans I say, ATTABOY!! And VIVE L'AMERIQUE!

About Me

About us, rather: Anne-Marie has worked as a translator, teacher, journalist, sportswriter (covering Formula 1 races), and director of corporate communications. She followed her husband Oscar into early retirement in 1998.
Oscar made his career in international development banking and since moving to Provence has become an expert on Provençal cooking.
Anne-Marie has written two books: Ten Years in Provence (2008 - out of print) and Taking Root in Provence (2011 - Distinction Press, Vermont).